Keepaway

In this horror movie remake, American couple Ben and Louise Dalton commit several cardinal sins.

They go to a remote cottage that doesn’t have a phone signal and pay little heed to things being “off.”

Their biggest error, though, is to visit people they met on holiday.

For any of you who are considering getting in touch with that couple you shared a sangria with this summer, Speak No Evil should serve as a cautionary tale.

Dulcie Pearce. “DEEPLY UNSETTLING Speak No Evil review: More sophisticated than most psychological thrillers you’ll see this year”

I'm not into horror movies, so this really isn't up my alley, but I had heard that Speak No Evil was a remake of the Danish movie The Guests, not a "based on a true story" or "ripped from the headlines" tale. So I'm not sure why it should be viewed as a cautionary tale to anyone who doesn't live on Elm Street.

This opening to the Sun's movie review reminded me of a recent episode of Derek Thompson's Plain English podcast; Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Progressives? Mr. Thompson interviews Greg Lukianoff, who raises the topic of "Reverse CBT (Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy)." CBT is, in a nutshell, designed to lessen the "cognitive distortions" that people tell themselves that make them anxious, depressed and/or generally unhappy. In Mr. Lukianoff's understanding of "Reverse CBT," therefore, there is a tendency to amplify these same distortions, one of which is overgeneralization. Now, I've never undergone CBT myself, but presuming that a horror movie is a representative sampling of what happens when visiting people one meets on vacation seems like it would be a good example of the phenomenon.

Of course, one could make the point that had Ben and Louise Dalton been more genre savvy, they'd have known something was up from the jump. But then again, if characters in horror movies were broadly genre savvy, there wouldn't be very many horror movies.

But here in the real world, the sorts of crazed psychopaths that are a significant portion of the population of, say, Haddonfield, Illinois, are pretty thin on the ground. It would take a remarkable stroke of bad luck to randomly meet one while vacationing in Italy. Not to mention that if one does want to embark upon a career of horror movie-style killing, traveling the world and then inviting likely couples to come visit seems unreliable at best, given that I suspect that Ms. Pearce isn't the only paranoid one out there. One would think that an aspiring serial murder would have more consistent selection methods.

In any event, the idea that the people one meets on vacation are poor choices for continuing friendships comes across a padding in the actual movie review, which is already pretty short, since it declines to delve into the actual plot of the movie. I'm not convinced that it was serious, and unsure that people would take it seriously, but be that as it may, it seemed like an odd inclusion, if for no other reason than the level of friendships that people have seems to be in decline. Why imply, even in jest, that safety demands that people further close themselves off?